EssilorLuxottica Special Award: Lilliput

Since 2022 EssilorLuxottica has supported the Fondazione Italia Patria della Bellezza by providing a visibility prize. EssilorLuxottica selects and promotes the most virtuous projects, creating an ad hoc campaign on the group's big screens.

Three projects received the Special Award in024, one of which is “Lilliput”. A multidisciplinary network of partners with expertise in culture, pedagogy, health, cultural welfare, art, illustration, museums, audience development, whose goal is to make museums family-friendly, i.e. places to be experienced, without barriers, able to contribute significantly to the cultural and social growth of children and families.

Lilliput's mission is to network museums, families and associations in order to rethink museum spaces from a family-friendly point of view and initiate a process of audience engagement that will bring more and more families with children to experience museums, discovering their heritage and beauty and spending fun moments with the whole family. The philosophy and pedagogical approach underlying Lilliput starts from the idea of the museum as a relational place, emphasising its social function. Families can spend quality time and at the same time learn with all five senses, not only didactically and narratively.

Lilliput proposes a new way of conceiving the museum, as a living instrument, open to relational approaches already in a free visit, without a guide, with supporting means that do not impact on the visit itinerary, but simply allow it to be experienced to the full. The works in the museum are therefore not only proposed from a didactic and narrative point of view, but become the starting point for playing with the imagination, with the five senses and the different types of art (performing, musical, corporeal...) with the ultimate aim of stimulating the creativity of the family, called upon to interact all together and to enjoy the cultural spaces, almost as if they were their own to be guarded and taken care of. 

Within Lilliput's aims, it is fundamental that relational experiences are activated, stimulating the imaginative side of places and works of art, acting on simplicity and provocation through play and participation to discover a new adult-child relationship. Munari once wrote: ‘If I listen I forget, if I see I remember, if I do I understand’. Lilliput's creative team has designed a kit that is transversal to several contexts and suitable for every type of museum. It is also important to equip museums with infrastructures that facilitate the experience for families such as: kids' corners with Montessori tables and chairs, risers for viewing the showcases, baby changing tables, bottle warmers, ergonomic baby carriers, and tools for facilitating the visit for the whole family.

In recent years Lilliput has collaborated with more than 50 museums in Italy and abroad and has actively participated in important projects such as the European project Lilliput Plus in collaboration with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, EUROPE, a network of 46 museums, historical sites and organisations dealing with historical memory and collective conscience in 18 European countries.